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My sons and I have very fond memories of playing Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Sam and Max etc as a family 20 years ago. Nowadays I tend to play solo games but my tend to play multiplayer games online.

The thing is though there's little or no overlap between what makes a good video game story and what makes a good film story. Last Of Us would make a boring TV series, and 12 Years A Slave would make a terrible video game. The two satisfy very different needs, neither could possibly substitute for the other. Nobody would ever want to play Crime And Punishment and earn the 'Murdered Unpleasant Lady' trophy.

Even when they put a video game in the same world as a TV series they have to tell a different kind of story to make either work.

My sons and I have very fond memories of playing Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Sam and Max etc as a family 20 years ago. Nowadays I tend to play solo games but my tend to play multiplayer games online.

Gaming is a solitary experience for me, unless someone is in the same room. No one in my family, except me, really plays and that exception also covers, for me, sci-fi.

Yes they are, my sons Last of Us and GTAV games are very well done, but they won't replace TV and movies any more than TV and movies replaced books.

But you can already see the shift to games from an industry point of view: high profile actors playing the main characters, Hollywood film composers doing the music, etc...

The Last of Us is not a replacement for television. That's a ridiculous claim to make.

It was so ridiculous, kittens died! But who actually made that claim?

Investing your free time into 40 hours of gameplay is like investing it into two seasons of a TV show. Production and marketing budgets of games are as big as those for summer tentpole films. And the return is even greater. And the trend that big movie stars turn more and more to TV shows is going to be repeated with big movie and TV stars turning to games. Some games's stories are so complex that you would be able to turn it into a season of episodes instead of a 2-3 hour movie.

And for me personally, gaming has already replaced television a great deal. So keep your condescending attitude someplace else. But ironically, it answers the thread question. Why do people judge gamers? Because the whole video game genre isn't taken seriously as a storytelling medium, even though it actually is.

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A movie aiming low should not be praised for hitting that target.

People are certainly putting more effort and paying more attention into video game stories, that's been true since Final Fantasy 7. But again, you don't play video games for the same reason you watch film.

If holodecks existed in real life, they wouldn't be holoprograms of novels, they'd be more like Mass Effect, programs where your decisions affect the story and you can live out your suppressed fantasies. Video games and movies satisfy different regions of your brain. One could never replace the other.

People are certainly putting more effort and paying more attention into video game stories, that's been true since Final Fantasy 7. But again, you don't play video games for the same reason you watch film.

If holodecks existed in real life, they wouldn't be holoprograms of novels, they'd be more like Mass Effect, programs where your decisions affect the story and you can live out your suppressed fantasies. Video games and movies satisfy different regions of your brain. One could never replace the other.

True. Personally, I don't want my entertainment to be interactive, hence my preference for books and films and dislike of gaming.

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Soon oh soon the light, Pass within and soothe this endless night, And wait here for you, Our reason to be here...

I think there's more acceptance of gaming as a proper, adult entertainment medium than ever has been before.

It helps that todays bright young things are a generation now who've never NOT had video games around. Even the previous generation were people for whom games were new and shiny, but todays twenty and thirty year olds never had a time in their life where video games did not exist. And these are the guys who are entering other industries like movies and television, so some of that pop-cultural acceptance is beginning to sink through to the mainstream. Thank goodness, it's taken long enough.

I think up until recently (maybe even still within an older demographic) the old perceptions did still exist. Certainly movies and TV have always been wary of video games, because they were for so long the 'new media' and were considered by some within the entertainment industry, particularly within television, to be a genuine threat as a medium of entertainment capital. So there was this broad distrust of video games from even within the entertainment sector, and that seeped out into the media (and the public) more generally.

It's in some peoples nature to judge others, this is not limited to judging on them if they are a gamer or not. People who watch Sci-Fi can be viewed negatively as well, as well as a host of other interests if the person judging them doesn't share them or understand them.

Wouldn't it be a lot better if people accepted that others might have interests which they don't share. I'm not an avid sports fan but I accept that it brings enjoyment to others. So if I enjoy Sci-Fi hows that any different?

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On the continent of wild endeavour in the mountains of solace and solitude there stood the citadel of the time lords, the oldest and most mighty race in the universe looking down on the galaxies below sworn never to interfere only to watch.